- Location
- Bakersfield, CA
We'd like to post up some tech about getting our rigs ready to race in King of the Hammers. If anyone doesn't know what King of the Hammers is, it's a combination desert race and rock race, a formatt that has never been done before. We were very happy to be included in the first ever race of this type, and even happier to finish in the top 10. Last year (actually Feb '08) was about 40 miles of desert and 10 miles of hard rock trails. We were fortunate enough to come in 7th out of 43, even after breaking a driveline and air locker lines and being down for about an hour.
I'll start with some things we did to prep the car for last years race. We added safety items including window nets and door bars, and a battery/engine kill switch, and a wide angle rear view mirror. Suspension wise we added 2" Fox air bumps to the front, with 3" of bump travel, and worked on the coilovers some to fine tune the secondary rate transition point. We also added 1/2" steel rings from Staun to the inside bead of the steel beadlocks, to help prevent bending the rim on the inside, and got a set of 40" Maxxis Creepy Crawler stickies. I beefed up the motor mounts by expanding the mounts to include 5 bolts on the block instead of just the 3 for the stock mounts. Rigwerks supplied a very beefy crossmember/belly pan. We prepped the car by beefing up some of the front suspension mounts, beefing up and double shearing the pitman arm, and going through the rig and tightening every bolt to proper torque using a torque wrench, and marked all of the suspension and steering bolts so we could see if they loosened. Also worked on all the vent lines to insure we'd have no leaks in case we rolled.
The one thing we didn't do was reroute and protect the air locker lines from heat. Running flat out generated much more heat than we were used to and melted sections of the lines, causing us to loose our lockers, which then led to breaking the CV in the rear driveshaft. Our crew brought us the spare shaft, and fixed the air lines, but we lost an hour.
Here's some pics of the rig ready for the last race.
I'll start with some things we did to prep the car for last years race. We added safety items including window nets and door bars, and a battery/engine kill switch, and a wide angle rear view mirror. Suspension wise we added 2" Fox air bumps to the front, with 3" of bump travel, and worked on the coilovers some to fine tune the secondary rate transition point. We also added 1/2" steel rings from Staun to the inside bead of the steel beadlocks, to help prevent bending the rim on the inside, and got a set of 40" Maxxis Creepy Crawler stickies. I beefed up the motor mounts by expanding the mounts to include 5 bolts on the block instead of just the 3 for the stock mounts. Rigwerks supplied a very beefy crossmember/belly pan. We prepped the car by beefing up some of the front suspension mounts, beefing up and double shearing the pitman arm, and going through the rig and tightening every bolt to proper torque using a torque wrench, and marked all of the suspension and steering bolts so we could see if they loosened. Also worked on all the vent lines to insure we'd have no leaks in case we rolled.
The one thing we didn't do was reroute and protect the air locker lines from heat. Running flat out generated much more heat than we were used to and melted sections of the lines, causing us to loose our lockers, which then led to breaking the CV in the rear driveshaft. Our crew brought us the spare shaft, and fixed the air lines, but we lost an hour.
Here's some pics of the rig ready for the last race.